by Jadyn Chase
He eased forward and my vision blurred, but I couldn’t look away. I knew he was about to kiss me, but I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want to stop it. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted this moment to change my life even as I didn’t want it to change anything.
Adrenaline burned my heart and butterflies twittered in my stomach. I tensed all over ready for the inescapable moment. He raised his hand and cupped my cheek, and fireworks went off in my brain. His fingers threaded into my hair and grazed my ear. I nearly gasped out loud in shock at the intensity of my own feelings. What in the name of God was he doing to me?
I felt myself melting in his grip. My self—the self I understood—drained out of my grasp no matter how hard I tried to hold onto it. I lost all sense of who I was or what I was doing there.
I watched him drift closer to me. His face lost all focus until his mouth came to rest on my lips. His mouth collapsed in a mind-blowing tide of softness that blew my world apart. His beard tickled my skin, and his lips found mine. How could anyone kiss so softly, so immaculately, so intoxicatingly?
He controlled my head with easy pressure on my scalp. He turned my face to one side, and his mouth covered my lips parting to let him in. I couldn’t see him or anything else, even with my eyes open.
How long it went on, I couldn’t say. I only knew nothing could ever be the same. No one would ever be able to kiss that part of my soul again after this. I might spend the rest of my life alone, just waiting for a man to possess me the way he did on that mountaintop.
He said he didn’t bring women up here, but I couldn’t believe I was anything special to him. We barely knew each other. I couldn’t hope I would affect him the way he affected me. That was impossible.
His arms and hands commanded me to turn and respond the way he wanted me to. The minuscule curves of his fingertips insinuated more information into my brain than I could ever understand intellectually.
He broke off, but he didn’t let go of my head. He gasped a broken breath between our lips and his forehead came to rest against mine. He closed his eyes and bowed his head while he still held my brow pressed into his.
His racing heart pounded through his arms, and he fought to get his breathing under control. He stayed like that, trembling all over with his eyes closed. I stared at him in wordless fascination. Maybe I misread him. Maybe that kiss meant something to him after all.
After a time, he opened his eyes and stared straight into my being with our noses and foreheads still crammed together. He gripped my head tight enough to crush my skull, but I didn’t want to be released. His masculine energy, the tempestuous power of his grip still poured into my mind with such force I couldn’t stop it.
He locked his gaze on me for an eternity. When he broke away, he didn’t let me go. He guided my head onto his shoulder. He hooked one elbow behind my neck and crushed me into him.
My hair cascaded over my face and hid me from the world, but I could only gape into the blackness of his t-shirt wondering at the astounding communion of it all. The experience overcame every experience I could relate it to. I couldn’t conceptualize what had happened and what continued to happen to me as long as he held me like that.
At last, he kissed the side of my head and let me go. I sat up, too stunned to react. He swiveled to one side. He laced his fingers through mine and leaned back into his place. He kept hold of my hand and turned his gaze to the view.
I turned, too. What else could I do? He didn’t laugh it off or even smile. He just relaxed into the same posture, only now he held my hand.
I studied the surrounding wilderness with heightened sight, hearing, smell, and touch. The mountains looked different now, but I couldn’t define how. He kissed me. He held my hand. The way he acted told me this was so much more than a picnic date with a kiss at the end.
Time slowed to a snail’s crawl. The sun inched across the sky and the day waned. Wyatt said nothing and neither did I. What could I say to make sense of all this? I didn’t want him to say anything, either. Anything he said would only spoil it by trying to put into words something that no one could ever explain.
I would have sat there until nightfall, but after a few hours, he got to his feet. “We better go down if you want to get there in time.”
I still said nothing. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to break the spell holding us together. What if this whole thing evaporated once we got off this mountain? What if the Ridge cast some spell over us, and we found it didn’t exist elsewhere?
He headed across the boulders toward the trail. Once we got on it, he had to let go of my hand. I followed him down the mountain, but his neck and hair and back and legs looked different now, too. I kissed him. Would he ever kiss me like that again? Would I remember today as a nice interlude on rainy afternoons?
The journey down went quicker than the journey up. Before I knew it, Wyatt reentered the clearing. My backpack sat under the tree where Wyatt left it.
He turned to me and raked his fingertips through my hair to brush it out of my face. “Are you going to be all right out here?”
I nodded, but no words came to my mind.
He nodded back at me. When he spoke, his voice cracked with strain. “I’ll call you tomorrow, all right?”
I could only nod like a dumb fool. I couldn’t think what to do or how to react. Should I kiss him again? Should I wait for him to kiss me? Should I put my arms around him? What behavior would be most appropriate after that moment we shared on the peak?
One thing became clear in an instant. The energy and reactions didn’t die away when we left the Ridge. I felt the same earth-shaking power in his presence. He didn’t have to kiss me. He didn’t have to dominate me with his touch. Just looking at him, just standing before him sent me into a deep state of soul-shattering connection.
Every pore of his skin sang to me. Every whisker on his jawline spoke volumes. The creases on his lips and around his eyes pulled me into his vortex so I couldn’t break away. If he touched me or kissed me like that again, I would react in exactly the same way.
He dropped his hand and clasped my fingers for a second. His skin filled my heart and soul with warmth. “See you.”
In a fraction of an instant, he walked away and left me alone.
6
Wyatt
I got fifty yards away from Piper’s camp and collapsed against a tree trunk, panting in agony. What the hell just happened to me up there? I hoped to kiss her, but I didn’t bank on her casting a spell over me that took all my strength to break.
What was she? Her beauty attracted me. I won’t lie about that. This went way beyond physical attraction, though. When I touched her wrist, when I looked into her eyes, when I brushed back her hair, I felt myself losing all sense of reality.
Why didn’t she say something? She didn’t acknowledge that she felt the same crashing power of our connection the way I did. She just accepted it. How could she? How could I kiss a woman and survive the mortal blows to my sense of self?
A smart man wouldn’t see her again. A smart man would go about his business and return to his Clan and wait for her to leave. She would record her precious bats and skedaddle back to Charlotte where she belonged. I would never see her again.
The very thought made me want to cry. I contorted around to face the trunk and buried my face in my arm against it. It gave me some solidity in this crazy old world. How could this happen? How could I meet a woman that cracked my heart wide open and watch her leave? How could I survive this?
I set off through the woods, but I already knew I wouldn’t go back up to the Ridge tonight. If I was going to back off and let her return to Charlotte, if I really planned to step away from this, I had to stay near her, just for one more night.
I paced through the woods without looking where I was going. She was right back there in the clearing under the Ridge. She would set up her camp and her cameras and whatever.
Would she think about me? Would she think about kissing me? Did that kiss
mean anything to her at all? How could she miss the intensity of it? Did I imagine the whole thing?
She didn’t say anything when I left her. She showed no emotion at all. She froze like a deer in the headlights. God, what was I doing hanging around a woman that felt nothing for me?
I spun on my heel and stormed back toward the cliff wall. I didn’t plan to show myself to her, but I needed to confront her in some way, even if I kept it confined to my own mind.
I got all the way back there. The minute I saw her outline through the trees, I stopped dead in my tracks. She squatted down next to her backpack and pulled stuff out of it. I remained concealed in the shrubbery and watched.
In the middle of unraveling her sleeping bag from the bottom of the pack, she paused in her work. She stared off into space for a moment. She gazed at the curtain of foliage to my right, and I got an uninterrupted view of her face.
A dreamy daze spread across her features. Was she thinking about me? Man, she was beautiful! I found it difficult to accept that she really might be available—available to me. I kissed her. I touched her face and her hair like that and she submitted to it.
Those eyes mesmerized my soul like no other. Kissing her broke me to my core so I never wanted to stop. Now here she was, lost in thought. Maybe kissing me affected her more than I realized. Maybe she just reacted to it in a way I didn’t anticipate.
I drifted into a mind-numb zone looking at her. I imagined kissing her again, putting my arms around her and drawing her into my embrace. Holy fuck, she felt so amazingly good there. I would give anything to get hold of her again.
Just then, she jolted alert and dove back into her pack for something. She went into a flurry of activity. She glanced at the sunbeams streaming through the canopy to light the clearing. The last rays snuck up the tree trunks. They lit the upper branches and left the clearing in shadow. Night would come soon, and she needed to get her camp set up before dark.
She laid out her sleeping bag in a likely spot and got to work making dinner. She collected a pot of water and heated it on her camp stove. I sank onto the ground, folded my legs under me, and leaned my back against a tree. I closed my eyes and listened to her move around her camp.
I didn’t need to see what she was doing. I was with her. That was the most important thing right now. I was near her. I was as near to her as I could be under the circumstances. I couldn’t get any nearer without crawling into her sleeping bag and waiting for her to finish work.
I must have been a lot more tired from last night than I thought. I bolted awake in pitch dark. I whipped around and strained my eyes to stare into the clearing. Piper sat on the grass with her night-vision tablet screen shining on her lap. She craned her head back to stare at the dark sky overhead.
From here, I heard the faint clicks and buzzes of hundreds of bats whirling through the night. Piper bent over her tablet and tapped something on the screen before she went back to looking upward. Her posture gave her the attitude of someone praying.
My heart went out to her. I shouldn’t have left. I should have stayed with her. I should be out there sitting next to her right now. I should be sharing this moment with her instead of hiding from her.
Just then, a crack of breaking wood split the undergrowth. My head jerked sideways to look in that direction. Piper spun around at the same instant and we both stared into the dark.
My nerves zinged to the breaking point and I pricked my ears to listen. When no sound came, Piper went back to staring up at the sky, but I eased slowly to my feet. I crouched behind the tree, ready for anything.
I spent too many years on the Ridge to mistake a sound like that. Only one animal snaps twigs in the dead of night, and it ain’t the Tasmanian devil. I crept sideways to skirt the clearing. Silence reigned, but my instincts told me something was out there.
Now that I knew he was there, my blood boiled in my veins. He must have been tracking Piper in search of the person who recorded him the other night. No other explanation made sense. Why would he come all this way otherwise?
Maybe he found the Jeep while I was busy with her up on the Ridge. Maybe he staked her out while I was asleep. I kicked myself. How could I be so careless? How could I let him get so close to me?
Still, he probably didn’t know I was here. He wouldn’t come creeping around if he did. He wouldn’t snap a branch and give his presence away for any Kelly to hear.
I gauged my position to ease that way. Whoever he was, he sure didn’t belong out here in the middle of the night. If it was one of the Lynches—and I would bet my bottom dollar it was—I would be the first line of defense to stop that sucker from attacking the Ridge.
Piper’s head swung around one more time. She fixed her gaze on the black forest. She couldn’t know what might be creeping up on her, but she wasn’t as oblivious as he probably thought. I made that mistake myself.
She put down her tablet and moved toward her backpack. She bent over and plunged her hand inside. With her attention diverted, I crept to my right toward where I heard the twig snap. Beyond the clearing, the faint black outline of a man moved in the undergrowth. Could he see me the same way I could see him?
I took a firm grip on myself and sidestepped. I selected each foot placement with extreme care. If he couldn’t see me, I didn’t want to break a twig like that and give my position away. With any luck, Piper would consume his attention, and he would miss me until the last second. Then I could use the element of surprise against him.
I kept my gaze trained on the clearing while I worked my way sideways to sneak closer. Piper glanced at the dark woods a few times while she hunted in her pack. What was she going after—another computer? A flashlight?
The stranger loomed large beyond the fringe of trees. He got as close to the clearing as he dared, but when Piper looked up from whatever she was doing, she didn’t look at him. She looked toward where the sound came from and he wasn’t there anymore.
My heart stuck in my throat when I realized he was standing a few feet away from her. He could reach through the leaves and touch her, and she didn’t even know it. If he so much as harmed a hair on her head, so help me….
At that moment, a thunderous crash ripped the forest apart. Piper leaped back with her pack still draped over one arm and her hand fully submerged in the pouch. I lunged upright in time to see the shadowy figure erupt out of the trees. He grew bigger and bigger. The branches and leaves shook and snapped, and the deafening noise disturbed the whole area.
A cacophony of screeches and cries shrilled across the night sky as the bats streaked to the safety of their holes, but Piper didn’t notice. She staggered back to get away from the monstrous shape bursting through the canopy to block out the stars. The huge form broadened and wings sprouted from its sides.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He must be a Lynch if he had the balls to show himself to a human like this. His neck arched. His red eyes burned down on the clearing. In a few seconds, a massive dragon stooped forward and narrowed his slit eyes at Piper.
She stumbled and tripped and fell flat on her backside with the backpack still covering one arm. She scrambled back to get away from him, but he stalked over shattered tree limbs toward her. Every step shook the Earth. He stomped into the clearing and lowered his head to glare into her startled face.
Piper scuttled halfway across the clearing until her free hand landed on top of the tablet. Its eerie green screen offered the only light in the clearing. Her palm skidded across it. In a fit of desperation, she glanced down and realized why she wasn’t making any further progress.
The dragon rumbled a threatening growl in the bottom of his chest. Smoke billowed from his nostrils, and he advanced on her lying prostrate in front of him. She looked so tiny and helpless compared to him.
His black hide melded seamlessly with the inky night. His back spikes cut jagged points across the firmament. I stared in horror at the thing moving in on Piper. How could I stand aside and do nothing while he destroyed
her?
I never questioned for an instant that he intended to do just that. He wouldn’t dare show himself if he didn’t plan to kill her. I had to do something to stop him, but that meant showing myself to her, too.
If I did that, I definitely could never see her again. I could never kiss her or even say goodbye to her. I would get rid of this upstart and vanish into the forest. She would go back to Charlotte, but that was probably for the best anyway. She wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me once she found out the truth.
I inhaled a deep breath. The forgotten mystery welled out of the secret recesses of my being. It threatened to break through my skin when, out of nowhere, Piper took her eyes off the dragon towering over her.
She rotated on her seat and attacked her backpack with renewed energy. She fumbled with it for a second before she succeeded in ripping it off her arm. She whipped up her hand and something metallic flashed in the night.
I blinked. Was this real? In an instant, she brought up both hands, gripping a small handheld revolver. Her hands shook to steady it. She braced both elbows and leveled the weapon at the dragon’s head. With no warning at all, she tightened her fingers around the trigger grip and fired.
7
Piper
I pulled the trigger but lying back on the grass like that didn’t give me the most stable base to shoot from. My whole body wobbled from the recoil, but with such a big target right in front of me, I couldn’t miss.
The bullet hit the dragon smack in the forehead and deflected off. A spark glanced off the monster’s scaly head and the bullet zinged off into the bushes. I squeezed off two more rounds and the same thing happened.
I gasped in terror at the hideous thing leering in my face. I couldn’t get my brain to function realizing I was staring at a real live dragon. It crouched in the clearing—or should I say it crouched half in the clearing? The back half of its enormous body crushed down the foliage in the woods.